On Tue, Sep 22, 1998 at 10:08:27PM -0400, Susan Duncan wrote:
> For me the decision depends on the application. If someone tells me, "I've got
> a few thousand items I want in a database on the web", I'm going to put them
> into Access on NT
In my not-so-humble opinion, this is a perfect example of solving
a problem the traditional way -- which will admittedly work -- instead
of thinking outside the box and making the problem go away. (See my
note on the Notes->Domino fiasco.) And no, I'm not trying to pick
on you -- it's just a handy example, and one that I happen to see a lot.
A "few thousand items"? You don't *need* a database. Your data set is
far too small to justify one. They're expensive, they eat resources,
they're tough to interface with (if you can), they (usually) take
training to use. And commercial ones are black boxes: you can't
reach inside to fix it if it's broken, but instead have to wait
for support (a bad industry-wide joke) to do it for you.
It's far simpler to store these items in a plain old flat ASCII file
and search it brute-force. If you need more speed, cause it to
be memory-mapped. If that's still not enough, then make it an
associative array, or put N copies of it in memory, where "N" is
the number of different fields you need to search by.
Why? Because CPUs are incredibly fast, memory and disk are available
in huge quantities, and all three are getting cheaper by the month.
If the combination of those three resources is not already sufficient
to meet the performance requirements -- using a brute force solution --
it probably will be in the very near future. And tying the solution
to Moore's law guarantees you a healthy amount of scalability, even
assuming zero improvement in the s/w or OS.
This approach also ducks all the issues that going with a
proprietary product raises. Most of those issues have significant
dollar signs attached to them.
This sort of situation arises all the time. Usually it ends up
with "...and so I can't use Linux/Unix because it doesn't run the
XYZ proprietary application", which is then used as a criticism.
It almost never occurs to the person making the statement that
the problem *isn't* Linux/Unix, the problem is that they aren't
considering innovative solutions and are stuck in the same-old mindset.
They don't really need the XYZ application, they need a problem solved...
but they've been conditioned (thanks to some exquisite marketing
techniques) to believe the former and not consider the latter.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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